There’s been a lot of hoo-ha in the media today about getting your seven a day, revised upwards from five (I’ve known a couple of years that five a day was always considered a ‘bare minimum’ – in other countries it’s ten, and I’m […]

After several months of rarely having a free weekend, we finally have some progress on the house. Three rooms are completely finished (the toilet, my office and the utility room – which wasn’t even in our original plans). The spare bedroom is almost there – just waiting to put in new flooring. […]

I’ve seen recipes online for chocolate spread before, but have never bothered trying to make them because they either used cacao powder, which I’d find too dry in this sort of recipe, or used the whole hazelnuts which (unless you have […]

You’ve all no doubt heard of a cocktail called a Bloody Mary. It’s bloody delicious and just what the doctor ordered if you’re having a bit of a ‘morning after the night before’. This delicious juice is called a Bloody Norah. Not because it contains either vodka or tomatoes, but because of its beautiful […]

Dad and I have a little tradition of giving each other increasingly silly birthday and Christmas gifts. It’s almost like a competition. At our beautiful wedding in Portmeirion, he gave us a box of penis pasta and a remote controlled rat. Appropriate, right? It’s OK though, we found that pretty hilarious One year I gave […]

We’ve lived in this house for almost nine years. We bought it for a couple of reasons. Firstly, that it was an old house with character in a lovely village, detached, plenty of rooms (albeit most of them – the five bedrooms – tiny) and it had a cracking Inglenook fireplace in the living room. […]

When we first moved to our house, our garden – such as it was (it was little more than a postage-stamp-sized patch of grass with a shed, a rotary drier and lots of mature shrubs) looked like this: Toward the end of 2011 the shrubs were so overgrown, it was difficult to use the rotary […]

As a child in the early 80s one of my favourite chocolate bars was Cabana – similar to a Bounty but with pieces of cherry mixed into the coconut centre, and with a layer of caramel on top of that, then covered in chocolate. It wasn’t a long-lived product – apparently it was only […]

I’ve drunk many different juices in the past year. Some good, some bad. Some amazing, some awful. But none as tasty as this one, which I could happily live on for the rest of my life. Seriously. This sweet, zesty, refreshing natural juice is best enjoyed on a sunny day in beautiful […]

After completing last week’s Big Juice Spring Clean (five days of nothing but juice – lost 7lbs, yay!) I found I had quite a lot of ingredients left over, unexpectedly. I could of course have just juiced them all; but having had five days without solid food, my tastebuds were desperate for something delicious […]